Ralph Ellison

Chronology of Coverage

Jan. 6, 2013

Invisible Man, Oren Jacoby's adaptation of Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, is set to open at Huntington Theater Company in Boston; production is directed by Christopher McElroen and stars Teagle F Bougere. MORE

Over the years, Ralph Ellison's unfinished second novel has assumed the status of a literary myth. His first novel, ''Invisible Man,'' published in 1952, established him unequivocally as a modernist master, and over the next four decades he labored to produce a follow-up to that masterpiece.

Some two years after Ralph Ellison died in 1994, his literary executor, John F. Callahan, stumbled across a box of papers in the writer's Manhattan apartment. At the bottom of the box was a brown imitation-leather briefcase, and inside the briefcase was a manila folder of manuscripts, typed on brown, crumbling paper. The file was marked ''Early Stories.''

If truth be told, Ralph Ellison, whose novel "Invisible Man" is one of the indisputable classics of American literature, has faded from the public mind, occupying what might be called a highly respected position on the sidelines of the general consciousness.

The critic Cyril Connolly once defined a classic as a book still read a decade after it is published. Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," which won the National Book Award in 1953, was instantly recognized as a masterpiece, a novel that captured the grim realities of racial discrimination as no book had. Its reputation grew as Ellison retreated into a mythic literary silence that made his one achievement definitive.

Ralph Ellison, whose widely read novel "Invisible Man" was a stark account of racial alienation that foreshadowed the attention Americans eventually paid to divisions in their midst, died yesterday in his apartment on Riverside Drive. He was 80.

February 21, 2010, Sunday

The Ralph Ellison Memorial is a sculpture 15 feet high at Riverside Drive and 150th Street, near an apartment building where Ellison lived for many years. Ellison's novel ''Invisible Man'' articulates the frustrations of a young black man's...